The French House by Helen Fripp (ebook reader with highlight function TXT) 📕

‘I lost everything…’

‘You have done everything I ever needed just by coming back. I don’t care about anything else.’

‘It’s a comet, by the way.’

‘What is?’

‘That shooting star that won’t go away. It’s a comet. The field hands will be stroking their rabbits’ feet and nailing their horseshoes the right way up. It brings omens of all kinds.’ He looked at Nicole sideways. ‘It’s brought me good luck so far.’

‘You can hardly even sit up; I’ll need to get you a carriage. My darling, dearest Louis, it will take too long to explain now, but no one can know you’re back, not yet, until we make a plan.’

‘Well, that’s no surprise. Nothing ever was straightforward with you.’

He was trembling with cold and his voice was barely louder than a whisper. She took off her cloak and wrapped it around him. He winced at the weight on his skin.

‘Don’t move a muscle and don’t you dare leave my sight ever again. I’ll be back with blankets and transport and you can stay with Antoine and Claudine and you’ll get better. And listen, I want to know everything!’

She blew him a kiss and ran back to the house, not caring about the freezing night air on her bare arms.

She checked the horizon when she arrived at the stables. The comète was still there. So that must mean that Louis was actually back. Her champagne comet, Louis alive. She threw a saddle on Pinot and flew.

Antoine and Claudine were attentive carers to Louis. Nicole gave them what she could for his upkeep and he was bedridden, so keeping his homecoming quiet was easy for now. He spent the first few days drifting in and out of sleep, but as the days passed and the vine shoots toughened, Louis began to tell his story.

She visited every evening, bringing firewood so Antoine and Claudine could afford to lay a fire for him, and he talked as she lost herself in the flames and forgot her troubles for a while, lulled by Louis’ stories of hoar frosts, frozen lakes, hardships and samovars of sweet tea. Unimaginable opulence of golden rooms, duck-egg silks and Fabergé eggs as Louis’ fortunes rose and fell, until, finally, he was arrested as a spy when Russian relations with France declined.

It was a glittering evening, he told her. Lights filled the ballroom and chandeliers flickered with hundreds of candles. Louis was talking to the lovely Tanya Kurochkin when they came for him. Two soldiers marched up and whispered in Tanya’s ear. She did nothing, just turned away from him, as did her friends and associates.

The men had flanked him each side, accusing him of spying for the French and escorted him out so roughly that he struggled to keep his feet on the ground. No one stopped them. He didn’t even have time to stop for his new wolfskin coat – and it was the kind of weather that made icicles of your eyelashes. They roughed him into the back of a barred carriage, tapped the back with the blunt of their swords and waved goodbye.

It was only when his eyes became accustomed to the dark, and the stench of human waste stung his nostrils, that he began to shiver. The bare stone cell they’d thrown him in was crawling with cockroaches and the windowless room stole all sense of night and day. He came to look forward to the moment when the slot was opened in the great door and a thin bowl of grey gruel was passed through. He would try to elongate these moments of human contact in his mind, make up allegiances that didn’t exist. He made the cockroaches into acquaintances, naming them for his friends. Louis described a tiny one, black and shiny, always busy, boldly leading the lines to the small spills of gruel he spared for them. That one was Babouchette. The clumsy brown one behind was Louis himself. The wayward one, always going in the opposite direction, François. Even Moët was represented, the biggest and shiniest of them, barging the others to get to the food first.

He wrote messages in Russian with the congealed gruel to communicate with the guards. Thank you. Delicious. Hello. Then, observations… New hat? No moustache? In love? Is she beautiful? The regular guard was young, a boy really. He was nervous at first, as if Louis might bite. Eventually he began to relax and smile. Louis lived for that smile. It was the sun on his face, his rain, his nourishment, his sunrise and sunset, the stars. He lost track of time. God knows how many months or years it was.

He had lost any sense of the years passing the day that Thérésa Tallien appeared with the guard, and he was afraid. She shone with health and the boy’s eyes glowed at her attention. The slot slid open and there she was, steely eyes narrowed, holding a candle up to light the cell.

‘Ah, there you are. Hiding from me in this miserable little place.’

She nodded at the boy and the door swung open, the boy proud of his part in Thérésa’s plans.

Louis didn’t move.

‘We must leave immediately.’ Thérésa held out her hand. ‘Darling, take it. We will leave here together. Move quickly now.’

Louis turned to bid farewell to the cockroaches and Thérésa nodded in understanding.

‘Your friends? Come. I have waited for death in one of these places. We will walk together.’

She took him to a hotel a night’s ride away from St Petersburg, saw him installed with a bag of coins, and left. She had a ring on every finger, each one a precious gem.

‘I cannot stay, darling. Take better care of the company you keep next time,’ she said, then left.

Nicole closed her eyes to conceal her relief. Thérésa had left him to himself.

‘You’ve suffered more than you tell me, Louis. You are brave.’

He looked at her, past her eyes and somewhere inside her.

‘Just lucky,’ he murmured.

She poured them both a brandy and stoked the fire.